Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture

Front matter

THE EARLY SOUND SLAPSTICK SHORT AND DEPRESSION-ERA MASS CULTURE

Luminos is the open access monograph publishing program from UC Press. Luminos provides a framework for preserving and reinvigorating monograph publishing for the future and increases the reach and visibility of important scholarly work. Titles published in the UC Press Luminos model are published with the same high standards for selection, peer review, production, and marketing as those in our traditional program. www.luminosoa.org

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Ahmanson Foundation Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

Part II. Case Histories

3. “The Spice of the Program”: Educational Pictures and the Small-Town Audience

4. “I Want Music Everywhere”: Music, Operetta, and Cultural Hierarchy at the Hal Roach Studios

5. “From the Archives of Keystone Memory”: Slapstick and Re-membrance at Columbia Pictures’ Short-Subjects Department

Coda: When Comedy Was King

List of Abbreviations Notes Index xi

N m ew m m ha m FOC aeQTAARSHEO

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AND AUDIOVISUAL MEDIA

FIGURES

Vivian Shaw, “The Cuckoo School of Humour in America” 24

Promotional photo of Bobby Clark and Paul McCullough 41 Frame enlargement from Snug in the Jug 48 Frame enlargement from Snug in the Jug 48 Frame enlargement from Snug in the Jug 48 Frame enlargement from The Big Idea 53 Frame enlargement from Don’t Get Nervous 56 Frame enlargement from Don’t Get Nervous 56 Frame enlargement from Don’t Get Nervous 56 Advertisement for Vitaphone 63

. Cover of MGM Shortstory 75 . Frame enlargement from Your Technocracy and Mine 83 . Frame enlargement from How to Sleep 86

Frame enlargement from How to Sleep 86

. Frame enlargement from How to Sleep 86 . Press sheet publicity for The Eligible Mr. Bangs 99

Production still from The Lions Roar 103

. Advertisement for Educational Pictures 109

. Press sheet publicity for The Constabule 115

. Production still from Palooka from Paducah 120 . Production still from One of the Smiths 122

X

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AND AUDIOVISUAL MEDIA

Sheet music for “Smile When the Raindrops Fall” 130 Cue sheet for Looser than Loose 133

Musical transcription for “You're The One I Love” 134 Musical transcription for “Your Piktur” 134

Frame enlargement from Looser than Loose 135

Frame enlargement from Looser than Loose 135

Frame enlargement from Looser than Loose 135

Frame enlargement from Looser than Loose 135 Production still from The Devils Brother 147

Special screening of Babes in Toyland at

Bellevue Hospital, New York 151

Production still from Babes in Toyland 153

Frame enlargement from So Quiet on the Canine Front 165 Production still from Healthy, Wealthy and Dumb 168 Production still of The Taming of the Snood 172 Production still from Hoi Polloi 185

Frame enlargement from Cash and Carry 188

Frame enlargement from Cash and Carry 188

Samuel D. Berns, “3 Stooges Ready ‘Fresh’ TV Series” 199

VIDEO CLIPS

Clip from Love and Hisses 45

Clip from Don’t Get Nervous 56

Clip from Day of Rest 89

Clip from Looser than Loose 135

Clip from The Taming of the Snood 172

AUDIO CLIPS

Melody from “You're the One I Love” 134 Melody from “Your Piktur” 134

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have sometimes had the feeling that I was working on this book in secret, the private hobby of a decade’s worth of summers. But I'll chalk that delusion up to the solitude of writing. I wont say that it took a village exactly, but it did take something like a campus or two.

The book has its genesis in 2006, in the chance confluence between my purchase of a DVD box set of Buster Keaton’s Columbia shorts and Charles Wolfe's invitation to contribute an essay on Keaton to a special issue of New Review of Film and Television Studies (vol. 5, no. 3). I don’t think he knows it, but it was Chuck who set me on the path that has eventually led here. Along the way, I have been supported by my colleagues and supervisors at the University of Toronto (where this project was started) and Columbia University (where it ended). I am particularly grateful to Elspeth Brown, Charlie Keil, and Janet Paterson at Toronto, and Nico Baumbach, Carol Becker, Jane Gaines, James Schamus, and Jana Wright at Columbia. Nic Sammond has been a patient auditor of my unformed ideas and gets his own sentence. Thanks, too, to Mark Lynn Anderson, Paul Babiak, Richard W. Bann, Hilde D*haeyere, Kathy Fuller-Seeley, Eric Hoyt, Steven Jacobs, Frank Kelleter, Richard Koszarski, Judith Yaross Lee, Jeff Menne, Ross Melnick, Tom Paulus, Joanna Rapf, and Yair Solan for helping me improve and develop my arguments.

None of what follows would have been possible without the archivists who enabled my research: Barbara Hall, Kristine Krueger, Jennifer Romero, and Faye Thompson at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library; Patricia Prestinary at California State University Fullerton’s Special Collections; Peer Ebbighausen and Roni Lubliner at NBC Universal xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Archives; Steve Massa at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; Lauren Buisson and Julie Graham at UCLA’ Special Collections; Ned Comstock at USC’s Cinematic Arts Library; Sandra Garcia-Myers at USC’s Warner Bros. Archives; and Amanda Stow at the University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Center. That I have come to plan my holiday vacations as archive trips is testimony to the companionship I always find there.

I have also benefited from the work of undergraduate and graduate research assistants who kindly took time from their own studies to help me: thank you, Michael Kaminski, Carolyn Condon, and Wentao Ma. Mauri Sumén, film composer for the Kaurismaki brothers, was a graduate student at Columbia while I was finishing this book and provided the musical transcriptions and audio clips for chapter 4. Columbia University’s film and video technicians, Peter Vaughan and Michael Cacioppo Belantara, created the movie clips when they weren't otherwise occupied showing me how to use a remote control.

Financial support for this project was provided by the Connaught Start-Up Fund at the University of Toronto, Columbia University’s Faculty Research Allocation Program, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Visiting Researcher Stipend Program of UCLA Film and Television Library’s Archive and Study Center. For the latter, Mark Quigley worked tirelessly in facilitating my stay at the archive and deserves particular thanks. The Open Access publication of this work was enabled by a donation to Columbia University’s School of the Arts and a grant from the Columbia Open- Access Publication fund.

Two remarkable editors at the University of California Press navigated the book through its ten-year passage, Mary Francis and Raina Polivka. It was Mary who saw the possible value of my writing a “sequel” of sorts to my first monograph, The Fun Factory (2009); and it was Raina who, inheriting the project in its final stages, encouraged me to explore the parameters of Open Access publishing. Their associates, Aimée Goggins and Zuha Khan, patiently held my hand through the big little things that crowd any book's final stages.

My research and writing were happily delayed in 2012 by the birth of Samantha and Sullivan. That this occurred two months after my relocation to New York created a special kind of chaos out of which I now find myself, four years later, with a rather splendid family. My partner, Inie Park, gave up several years of weekends to let me hole up in my office while a real-life slapstick onslaught was happening just outside the office door. The twins gave me an invaluable education in humor, even though they'd choose Dinosaur Train over Laurel and Hardy every time. If there is something humming in the background of the following pages, it is my attempt to see my childhood self in you, kids,

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii and to find my present self in my parents, Marilyn and Peter King, to whom this book is lovingly dedicated. The reasons will crop up occasionally in what follows. *

Material from chapter 3 was initially incorporated into “The Spice of the Program’: Educational Pictures, Early Sound Slapstick, and the Small-Town Audience,” Film History 23, no. 3 (2011): 313-330, and sections from chapter 5 are adapted from “Slapstick and Mis-Remembrance: Buster Keaton’s Columbia Shorts,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 5, no. 3 (December 2007): 333-352.

NOTE ON DATES

In what follows I cite the month and year of release of all short subjects, but only the years for features. In instances when an exact release date is impossible to ascertain—as, for instance, for many early Vitaphone shorts—I give a best guess as to the rough time frame when the film was first placed in distribution.

Introduction

Keyword: Hokum

The word “hokum” is one of several examples of stage slang whose meaning, at a certain point in the 1920s, was much debated. According to a 1926 article in American Speech, it was the “most discussed word in the entire vernacular” of popular entertainment (another was “jazz”).1 The term seems to have origins in the late nineteenth century, perhaps deriving from “oakum” (material used to calk the seams of a ship; by extension, “sure-fire” gags and other material used to secure the success of a stage act) or, alternatively, as a combination of “hocus-pocus” (sleight-of-hand, trickery) and “bunkum” (nonsense). Still, those origins are sufficiently questionable that novelist Edna Ferber, in her 1929 Cimarron, could claim that the term was of exclusively twentieth-century derivation. (“The slang words hokum and bunk were not then [1898] in use.”)? The ambiguous sources of “hokum” also correspond to a split in its development, which, by the 1920s, had seen the sense of “sure-fire” shift in the more disparaging direction indicated by “bunkum” Writing in 1928, a reporter for the New York Times expressed incredulity that a term once describing material that “‘get[s] over’... with an audience” was now synonymous with “hooey, tripe, apple-sauce, blah and bologna.”

The word seems to have something to do with comedy, although this is not invariable. An article in the Times of 1923 indicated a possible melodramatic reference as well, describing hokum as “old and sure-fire comedy. Also tear-inducing situations; which suggests hokum’s applicability to anything that traded in strong or obvious effects, whether of comedy or of sentiment.* “Hokum is not always comedy; sometimes it borders on pathos” echoed the essay in American Speech. Still, the reference to comedy, specifically of the knockabout, slapstick variety, was primary.

One early piece, from 1917, parsed the term generally as “low comedy verging on vulgarity” Others were more specific, concentrating a retrospective sense of the term by referring it to residual traditions of comedic performance. “It is doubtful whether the most inveterate of theatergoers knows what is meant by the term ‘hokum stuff?” noted one writer in 1915, explaining, “It is an old-time minstrelman equivalent for slap-stick comedy.” A decade later, Vanity Fairs Walter Winchell referenced circus clowning: “Actors who redden their faces, and wear ill-fitting apparel, and take falls to get laughs are hokum comics?” The New York Times meanwhile used cinematic examples, relating “hokum” to one- and two-reel slapstick shorts of the 1910s:

When Charley [sic] Chaplin smeared somebody’s face with a custard pie, that was considered good gag [sic]; but when every comedian of the one and two reels made use of the idea, then it became hokum.

A considerable number of rarely humorous devices for laughter were invented by the old Keystone Comedy [sic]; and every once in awhile, some of these ancient tricks crop out [sic]. Then somebody acquainted with the true meaning of the word, cries “hokum!”?

It is difficult to read far in the flurry of these articles without perceiving in “hokum” the symptom of a shift in comic sensibility. The word had more than merely ambiguous meanings: it had an unmistakable trajectory that shifted from description (gags that “get over”) to denigration (“old-time,” “apple-sauce”). That trajectory, moreover, crested sharply around the mid-1920s, when the term was apparently never more widespread. (A Google Ngram search reveals that the word's frequency was highest in 1926, constituting 0.000023 percent of words in now-digitized US books, an over 15,000 percent increase from the start of the decade.)

The later sense of “old-time” is not surprising: one of the characteristics of knockabout or slapstick comedy is that it has often been disparaged as passé, a disavowed yardstick ever since the movement in American variety theater toward polite vaudeville in the 1880s and 1890s. Yet the sudden popularization by the mid- 1920s of a cant or slang term for that status bespeaks a more confident spirit of devaluation. In this sense the secret meaning of hokum’s ascendancy is the decisive banalization of a comedic style that, in vaudeville as in film, had once formed a contested mainstay of early twentieth-century mass culture. This book will track the sources and processes of that devaluation as it unfolded in the years to come. My focus will fall squarely on film—already by the 1920s the primary venue where slapstick was encountered by the American public—and within that focus, I will be concentrating not so much on feature-length films as on the one- and two-reel subjects where, according to the Times, hokum was commonest currency. The introductory pages that follow flesh out my reasons for these choices and establish the historiographic premises that will underpin my investigation.

THE “END” OF SLAPSTICK? TWO PREMISES Premise 1: Rethinking Sound

The idea that film slapstick sank into abrupt decline in the late 1920s may seem familiar. One of the hoariest clichés of comedy history holds that Hollywood's conversion to sound—beginning in 1926 and completed by 1929—profoundly changed the course of film comedy’s development. The coming of sound, it is said, represents a decisive turning point at which the art of the great silent clowns—Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and others—came to an end, hinging instead into the crude realism of lesser talents like the Three Stooges. But it is precisely this sense of an “end” that we might first want to come to grips with here, since it will be part of my argument that film slapstick’s troubled history from the late 1920s on has been misleadingly framed. Why, for instance, has the coming of sound commonly been thought of as a kind of Rubicon moment vis-a-vis screen comedy? Why is comedy, uniquely among film genres, so clearly divided into silent versus talkie eras? After all, as film historian David Kalat has suggested, there is no comparable discrimination that would mourn the end of the “silent western” as though technological change alone amounted to a decisive generic mutation." With comedy, though, it is as if sound has come to constitute nothing less than an allegorical gap dividing screen comedy’s Edenic glories from its subsequent Fall. Three classic accounts can serve as evidence.

James Agees eloquent 1949 Life essay, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,’ is perhaps the most celebrated of these, establishing many of the basic premises of this master narrative. Agees essay was crucial in positioning the silent features of Chaplin, Keaton, Harry Langdon, and Harold Lloyd as a kind of Mount Rushmore of comic achievement, and it did so by using sound as a kind of whipping boy against which the performative virtuosity of the silent clowns might best be measured. “When a modern [i.e., sound] comedian gets hit on the head,” Agee wrote, the most he is apt to do is look sleepy. When a silent comedian got hit on the head he seldom let it go so flatly. He realized a broad license, and a ruthless discipline within that license. It was his business to be as funny as possible physically, without the help or hindrance of words. So he gave us a figure of speech, or rather of vision, for loss of consciousness. In other words he gave us a poem, a kind of poem, moreover, that everybody understands. The least he might do was to straighten up stiff as a plank and fall over backward with such skill that his whole length seemed to slap the floor at the same instant. Or he might make a cadenza of it—look vague, smile like an angel, roll up his eyes, lace his fingers, thrust his hands palms downward as far as they would go, hunch his shoulders, rise on tiptoe, prance ecstatically in narrowing circles until, with tallow knees, he sank down the vortex of his dizziness to the floor, and there signified nirvana by kicking his heels twice, like a swimming frog.”

But such pantomimic virtuosity simply did not lend itself to dialogue, which, in Agees opinion, belonged to an entirely separate performative tradition. “Because [the motion picture now] talks, the only comedians who ever mastered the screen cannot work, for they cannot combine their comic style with talk?” Agee’s is, in this sense, a kind of technologically determined history of performative practice: cinema's silence demanded a newly expressive form of physical performance— one requiring the “talents of a dancer, acrobat, clown and mime”—that could not “combine” with dialogue humor.

This basic sense of incompatibility would carry through a quarter century later into the first scholarly overview of film comedy, Gerald Mast’s 1973 The Comic Mind. Once again, a technological limitation (silence) is said to have created a performative form that simply could not survive the altered climate of talking pictures. With sound, we are told, a “particular kind of comedy died” “One of the reasons great physical comedians developed in the teens and twenties was that the potential of the medium demanded their services. The physical comedian who communicated personality, social attitudes and human relationships by physical means . . . was an outgrowth of a medium whose only tools were movement, rhythm, and physical objects and surfaces.”"* Mast’s conclusion from this sounds perplexing—“Sound comedy is structural, not physical”—but by this he means simply to convey the idea that sound comedy is more structured insofar as it is “carefully molded in advance” by the director and writer. If the essential relation in sound comedy is between the writer and the page, Mast proposes, then the kernel of silent comedy was the bond between the clown’s body and the camera.”

The idea that silent comedy was not “carefully molded” at the scripting stage is completely spurious, of course, at least as concerns the overwhelming majority of slapstick shorts and features from around the mid-1910s on. Yet despite these vagaries, Mast does introduce an important addition to the Agee template by premising his argument on an explicitly stated theory of filmic art, which a brief footnote attributes to Rudolph Arnheim's classic 1933 study, Film as Art. As Mast glosses Arnheim: “It has often been said that art is a function of limitations, that the province of art is precisely that gap between nature and the way nature can be imitated in the work of art.” Hence, Mast concludes, film comedy became art to the degree to which comedians found expressive physical means to “compensate for [the] gap” that the mediums silence had installed.’

It is this position that critic Walter Kerr would develop two years later, in his magisterial 1975 study The Silent Clowns. Arnheim is no longer cited, but Kerr’s language makes the indebtedness unmistakable. “Logically, art begins in a taking away, Kerr argued. “Each limitation on the cameras power to reproduce reality . . . [paved] the way to an exercise of art?” (Compare the wording of Arnheim's 1933 text, which argues that cinematic artistry depends on “robbing the real event of something”—on withholding attributes of color, three-dimensionality, and sound—such that silent film therefore “derives definite artistic possibilities from its silence?) For screen comedy, this distance from reality became the foundation of the form's silent-era achievement as fantasy: the appeal of the silent clowns, Kerr argued, rested in their liberation from the laws of the ordinary physical world. “None of the limitations of the silent screen . . . seemed limitations to its comedians. Rather, they seemed opportunities for slipping ever more elaborately through the cogs of the cosmic machinery, escaping the indignities of a dimensional, hostile universe. Fly through the transom when a policeman locks the door? Why not?” Sound, in restoring the realism of the filmed image, killed the fantasy on which comic artistry depended.

[Sound] gives the lie to the very kind of comedy—the very original kind of comedy— audiences had cherished: comedy in which the real world had not only been tamed but, in its dreamlike submission and in its swift unexpected conjunctions, made lyric... . With the form itself gone, we could no longer see [the silent comedians] as we had once seen them: as mysteriously mute archetypes who had made bizarre bargains with a half-imagined, half-authentic world. The game was over.”

We will have cause to unpack these models further over the course of this book. For the present, it is important only to note how their prioritization of technological factors produces, in each case, a historiography grounded in discontinuity. The technological properties of cinema—its original silence and subsequent voice—are approached as decisive mutations in comedic representation: the former generates a new performative tradition as an “outgrowth” (Mast) of the medium, while the latter stops it dead. What we get by way of explanation is thus little more than the “random autonomy of invention” from which other forms of causation (cultural, economic, etc.) are excluded from the outset. What we might better pursue is an approach that, without discounting the genuine difference that technological changes make, nonetheless understands those changes as what media theorist Ian Hutchby calls “affordances” that frame—but do not inevitably prefigure—possible directions of development.” Only when we stop confusing a technological property with a comedic tradition will it become possible to conjoin screen slapstick before and after the conversion era as a developing trajectory whose historical explanation exceeds a merely technological determinism.

Premise 2: Displacing Features

But it is perhaps not only the reification of silence that is a problem for the history of screen comedy. Historical apprehension of slapstick’s varied fortunes into the sound era has also been obstructed by a focus on the individual careers of the canonized slapstick clowns. To the extent that film historians have prioritized the careers of Chaplin, Keaton, Langdon, and others, they have fractured the history of slapstick into a series of incommensurable narratives. Buster Keaton’s career, we learn, was derailed by a coincidence of personal and professional misfires that were his alone: the loss of artistic control when he signed with MGM in 1928; the deterioration of his marriage to Natalie Talmadge; his growing alcoholism. Harry Langdon fell victim to hubris in firing his director, a young Frank Capra, and opting to direct himself in three disastrously received subsequent features— Three’s a Crowd (1927), The Chaser (1928), and Heart Trouble (1928)—that torpedoed his career at the moment of the industry’s transition. Charles Chaplin meanwhile became an outlier many times over, in part through artistic choice (alone among his peers, he refused to capitulate to the talkie trend until he finally allowed the tramp to talk in The Great Dictator [1940]), in part by inactivity (he completed only two features in the 1930s, City Lights [1931] and Modern Times [1936]), in part by his socialist political commitments. My point here is not to question the at times quite dubious accuracy of these narratives (the story of Langdon’s “hubris,” for instance, originates in Capra's autobiography and is hardly disinterested). Rather, I am concerned with the ways these explanatory models displace any apprehension of the larger province of slapstick filmmaking within which these comedians worked: a historiography oriented around the great silent-era clowns inevitably collapses into the irreducible singularities of so many careers. It is, perhaps, the very incommensurability of the great comedians’ passage through these years that gives a spurious legitimacy to the one thing they all shared—the transition to sound—as a master explanation.

This problem commends a shift of focus to short subjects. Such a shift would not only, by definition, pull the historiography of American film comedy out from the shadows of the famed feature-length comedians, but it would also restore a fuller sense of film slapstick’s place within what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would have described as the “field” of comedy production during this period. The notion of a field, as developed primarily in Bourdieu’s 1992 The Rules of Art, designates in the most straightforward sense the “social microcosm” —the relations and interactions among individuals, groups, and institutions—that makes up a given sphere of cultural production (so that one may speak, for instance, of the “literary field,” the “intellectual field? and so forth).** I will take up later the question of how field analysis opens onto surrounding social formations; for the present, I only want to note how receptive the short-subject sector is to such an approach, allowing for a more complex inventorying of the variables and controversies involved in slapstick’s sound-era decline. The world in which short-subject comedians and their filmmakers moved was not simply a miniaturized enclave of the film industry; it was a sphere of filmmaking shaped by a sui generis network of interpersonal, professional, and institutional relations radiating out of the studio gates into the larger fields of vaudeville, burlesque, circus, and even literary humor within which hierarchies of comedic value—and slapstick’s place within them—were defined.

Sam Warner, of Warner Bros., recognized as much when he assigned to ex-vaudevillian Bryan (“Brynie”) Foy the initial responsibility of managing the earliest Vitaphone shorts, until 1931: formerly one of the Seven Little Foys, Brynie’s résumé made him uniquely suited to call in the talents of the nation’s best vaudeville acts, in the process shaping a house style at Warner of “virtual Broadway” Professional networks were also defined by prior affiliation within the film industry, often reaching back many years. A case in point is provided by the short-subject unit at Columbia Pictures under the stewardship of Jules White, first appointed to the studio in 1932 by Columbia boss Harry Cohn. “He [Cohn] never bothered me,” White recalled. “He didn’t consider my department important enough to bother with” —a hands-off policy that allowed White, together with his brother Jack, to chase up professional connections from their years in silent comedy and build a roster of veteran comic talents.” Outside of above-the-line talent, meanwhile, the social microcosm of short-format comedy was also shaped by new technical and musical personnel brought into the industry during the transition to sound: the Hal Roach Studios’ 1928 contract with the Victor Talking Machine Company, for instance, would bring to the studio a number of Victor employees—sound engineer Elmer Raguse, A&R man Leroy Shield—who would play major roles in innovating the soundscape of early talkie comedies. In sum, if we seriously want to understand the transformations in sound-era slapstick, we need to patiently enumerate the full range of different agencies and actors that mediated these transformations; we need, that is, to “follow the natives” instead of abstracting a handful of “artists” (Chaplin, Keaton, etc.) or mobilizing a few global causes (sound, modernity, etc.) to which are attributed a mass of effects.” The short-subject sector, qua field, permits just such an analysis.

Also favoring shorts is the very direct optic they provide on audience taste and demand. Not only was the short subject the most widely disseminated filmic format for the slapstick idiom—the major studios typically produced and/or distributed between two and three dozen one- and two-reel comic shorts every year—but it was also the only one whose function was framed in purely representative terms. It was simply as comedy that each slapstick short was promoted by exhibitors (common tags in newspaper ads were “plus two-reel comedy” or “news, comedy, cartoon”), and it was simply as comedy that each was assessed. “Heres a comedy that is a comedy,” “Not [Charley] Chase’s best comedy, but still a comedy,” “Sold to us for a comedy, but is poor?” The seeming circularity of such evaluations bespeaks the absence of any presumption that short-subject comedy might be evaluated outside of the simple criterion of funniness: the value of short-subject comedy was simply that it should “be” comedy, with no expectation of surplus, of, say, artistic experiment or idiosyncratic deviation. The very transparency of these expectations indicates the short subject as a streak-free window onto changing sensibilities: if short-subject slapstick “declined” during the 1930s, then this was surely in part because the style of comedy in question no longer answered to audiences’ entertainment needs, at least within the industry's primary markets.

The same conclusion follows from the peculiarities of short-subject distribution during this period. One of the distinctive aspects of the short-subject sector, in comparison with features, was the greater flexibility for exhibitors to select from each studio’s offerings, based on their predictions or understandings of audience demand. An early case in point was provided by Warner Bros., which by the summer of 1928 yielded control over the choice of shorts to the exhibitors who had contracted for its services, offering a catalog that included newer titles alongside previous releases. As film historian Charles Wolfe notes, “The Vitaphone shorts were [thus] treated less as motion-picture events than as a commercial library of recorded performances . . . that could be rented and replayed on an ongoing basis” and, presumably, selected according to the tastes of local audiences.” Other studios did not go quite that far but, at least after 1933, permitted varying degrees of exhibitor choice. In that year, the practice of what was called “full-line forcing’—a controversial extension of block booking, whereby the major studios had forced theater owners to take their full lines of shorts as a condition of accepting features—was outlawed under the auspices of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). Whereas previously exhibitors had often been forced to accept many more major-studio short subjects than they could possibly play in a single season—a strategy designed to freeze out independently produced shorts—the NIRA’s Motion Picture Code was more equitable: distributors could now force shorts only in proportion to the number of rented features. Exhibitors’ subsequent freedom of selection can be illustrated by the case of the Interstate circuit in Texas, which drew interested trade commentary when it took the unique step of establishing its own short-subject booking department in 1934: the department’s five-person team—headed by the appropriately named Besa Short—would preview short subjects, assemble them into programs for the circuit’s different theaters, and arrange subsequent bookings based on audience feedback, practices that remained in place at Interstate for the rest of the decade. “No other film property has the latitude and elasticity in booking as has the short subject? Short proclaimed.” It is in fact this very margin of elasticity that renders shorts so receptive an interface for examining patterns of exhibitor need during this period. Again, if short-subject slapstick declined in the sound era, then a plausible hypothesis would surely posit a lack of primary-market demand. We will want, further, to examine this in terms of distribution: where, if anywhere, were these films reliably booked? and where no longer?—questions I take up in chapter 3.